


Following the Lead

by Ladybug_21



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Journalism, Mentors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23731261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: The irony was that Maggie Radcliffe had always admired Olly Stevens's tenacity in pursuit of a good story. That was why she had hired him to work atThe Broadchurch Echo, in the first place. (Mostly pre-canon, with a bit of overlap into the first episode of Season 1.)
Relationships: Jocelyn Knight/Maggie Radcliffe, Maggie Radcliffe & Olly Stevens
Comments: 9
Kudos: 41





	Following the Lead

**Author's Note:**

> Just rewatched the first episode of _Broadchurch_ , and—in between screaming gleefully at David Tennant's face and DEEPLY RELATING to all of Ellie Miller's professional experiences and also deciding that Beth Latimer deserves an entire season of just happily playing with puppies—I've become weirdly invested in the adorable relationship between Maggie Radcliffe and Olly Stevens, notwithstanding the fact that Olly is actually the worst. I own no rights to _Broadchurch_.

Maggie could still remember the first time she set eyes on Olly Stevens. At the time, he was a scrawny, squirmy ten year old, dragged into the office of _The Broadchurch Echo_ by his mother.

"How _dare_ you publish something like this about me!" Lucy Stevens snapped, slapping a recent copy of _The Echo_ down onto the top of Maggie's desk.

"I'm sorry, who're you?" Maggie replied, wrinkling her nose at Lucy.

"Oh, that's rich," scoffed Lucy. "Libelling me right and left, without even being able to recognise my face!"

Maggie shrugged. She was new to Broadchurch, had only taken over the editorship of _The Echo_ a month ago, still couldn't even remember all of her new neighbours' names, let alone all of the names that appeared in her paper. Yvonne had proven herself dependable, and if Yvonne had decided that whatever _The Echo_ had published on this woman had checked out, then Maggie felt comfortable standing by it.

"Lucy Stevens," the woman sighed by way of impatient introduction, and when Maggie's brain didn't instantly recall what Lucy Stevens had done, Lucy snatched the paper from under Maggie's hand and flipped it open to an article somewhere in the middle, her lips pursed angrily.

Maggie, meanwhile, turned her attention to the small boy who now hovered quietly behind Lucy. He was watching Maggie intently, seemingly unmoved by his mother's umbrage, his expression more curious than hostile. For some reason, the sight of him made Maggie smile a hesitant, sympathetic smile, and the boy seemed to accept this with as much equanimity as everything else.

"There." Lucy brandished the paper with a crisp snap before Maggie's face. " _Local PTA Member Accused of Embezzling Bake Sale Funds_."

Maggie frowned slightly as she skimmed the article, her mind reviewing and checking off all of the interviews and follow-ups that Yvonne and the rest of the small team had gone through. Everything done correctly, thank god.

"I can assure you, we did our homework," she told Lucy calmly. "Interviewed four different members of the parent-teacher association, as well as the local bank and several schoolchildren who were present at the bake sale."

"And you didn't think to call _me_ , for _my_ side of things?" snarled Lucy.

"We did," Maggie informed her. "And you never returned any of our messages."

"When?" insisted Lucy.

"Wednesday evening and Thursday evening," Maggie replied, because that was the standard procedure, to make final follow-up calls the two nights before the piece went to print.

"I was home," Lucy sniffed.

"No, you weren't," mumbled the boy, "because you sent me over to Auntie Ellie's both nights."

"Olly, shut up," snapped Lucy, and Olly bit his lip. "Look, all I wanna know is, why are you journos doing this to me, trying to sully my good name in this town?"

"Because the point of journalism is to tell the truth," Maggie told her simply. "Even when it's not pretty, even when it's not flattering, the truth matters."

Olly was watching her with attentive dark eyes, his fidgeting stilled. Lucy fumed, but instead of retorting, she seized Olly by the hand and pulled him from the office. Maggie watched the two depart, Lucy's eyes narrowed in fury as she stormed ahead, Olly's own gaze open and serious as he looked over his shoulder at Maggie before he rounded the doorframe and disappeared.

Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised Maggie, then, that four years later, Olly reappeared in the doorway of her office—taller now, getting quite handsome, his voice dropped to a pleasant baritone as he introduced himself.

"How can I help you?" Maggie asked him from behind her desk.

"I'm on my school's newspaper," Olly explained. Something of the fidgeting ten year old somehow remained in Olly's restless demeanour; he seemed unable to simply stand in one place, but rather shifted constantly from foot to foot as he spoke. "Can you teach me how to be a journalist?"

"Oh, petal," Maggie laughed, "that's a years-long process, at the very shortest." But when she saw how still Olly had suddenly gone, the confident tilt of his head suddenly levelled, she added, "Still, no time to start like the present. Come by the newsroom after school, when you feel like it; we'll put you to work however we can."

And Olly did. Maggie had envisioned that the teenager would float into and out of the newsroom at random; no doubt a young man like Olly would have plenty to distract him in the hours immediately following the end of classes. But, to her surprise, Olly began appearing regularly, and his dark eyes soaked in everything: transcriptions, photography, line-editing, layout, adverts, graphics. He lingered impatiently on the sidelines of things, until Maggie finally turned to him one afternoon and said, "What d'you think, Olly?" and from then on, it became nearly impossible for anything at _The Echo_ to occur without first being submitted to the multilayered opinions of Olly Stevens.

He was a good journalist-in-the-making, anyone would have conceded that quite readily. Good enough for Maggie to quickly figure out a way to wrangle a small salary for his part-time work, because the advantage to being the editor was that she was allowed to make such decisions without going through official processes. Olly was smart, and a quick learner, and he remembered minutiae that had taken Maggie herself years to master. But there was something more to his personality that Maggie respected, despite his young age. Olly approached the business of investigating and reporting the news with a ferocity and passion that bordered on the fanatical; he had no patience for those who would settle for anything less than perfection, and he treated the printing of every new edition of the newspaper with a sort of reverence that Maggie found touching, especially in this, the waning era of printed news.

What Olly Stevens had, she decided, was a _vocation_ , a true calling to be a journalist. When she was in the mood to flatter herself, Maggie liked to imagine that her own mentors in the industry had taken her under their wings because they had seen in her the same hunger that she now saw in Olly.

"For heaven's sake," Maggie yawned one evening, stretching her arms above her head, "no one who's only a month from taking their A levels should be working this late at night on something that can wait until morning. Go home, have dinner with your parents, get some rest."

Olly said nothing as he deleted a sentence and drummed his fingers on his desk, thinking through how to reword it better.

"Do you know," he said finally, "how much this place means to me?"

"After spending the past seven years scrutinising every last grain of sand for good story potential? Yeah, I can imagine. What, getting prematurely homesick?"

"Not Broadchurch," Olly said quietly. "I mean _The Echo_. Being able to come here after school."

Maggie watched as Olly, still looking at the computer screen, tried to rally the words to say what he meant. Of course she knew about Lucy's gambling problems—everyone in Broadchurch did—but Maggie had never had the heart to address them with Olly, who always arrived with the air of being all business, all the time.

"When I was really small," Olly continued, "you said something once, about the truth mattering. Maybe not too surprising that it stayed with me, given that all I ever got at home were lies, and then more lies to cover the first ones. About where certain family heirlooms had disappeared to, or about where she'd been the night before, or about why I couldn't have this new pair of trainers or that computer game for my birthday. And, of course, there's always been the biggest lie, the one that she's repeated so often that it's empty by now: that she'll stop."

Olly finally turned to Maggie.

"This place taught me how to be an investigator," he said. "I notice things now. Who shoots my mum a meaningful glare as they pass in the street. The receipts for the pawned items and the tallies of last night's losses, crumpled up in the wastepaper basket. But more than anything else, it's made me care about making sure that people _confront_ the truth. At home, I have to live by my mum's rules, and there are certain things that just can't be said. _The Echo_ isn't like that. In the newsroom, I feel like what I say actually matters, and that if I find something true that needs to be told to the world, it's my right to say it. It's my _duty_ to say it. I've never felt more free than I do when I'm here." He quirked half a smile at her. "So, what I'm trying to say is, thanks, for everything."

Maggie's eyes, watering slightly, crinkled as she smiled back.

"Of course, petal," she told Olly. "Don't know what we'll do without you, once you leave. But I won't complain about how much we'll miss you, because god knows you deserve to go out there and become the journalist you were always meant to be."

And Maggie meant every word of it. Life went on at _The Echo_ after Olly left for uni, but Maggie was still always delighted when he dropped by during holidays, to catch up on all of the gossip over tea and scones across the high street at the Traders Hotel.

"So, where to, after you're done?" Maggie asked Olly, on one such occasion. "London?"

"That's the dream," Olly grinned. "It's a changing industry, though. They're hiring fewer and fewer people every year."

"You don't need to tell _me_ that, petal, I can assure you," Maggie scoffed. "But you've got what it takes. I know it. And I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for you."

But two years later, Olly was back in Broadchurch, slinking into _The_ _Echo_ 's office like a dog with its tail between its legs. Maggie immediately dragged him across the street and ordered two bourbons from Becca.

"No one was hiring," Olly explained bitterly. "I was almost through my savings, just trying to pay the rent on my flat in London. And then my mum... needed my help. So I came back."

Maggie put a sympathetic hand on Olly's shoulder as he buried his head in his hands with a sigh of frustration.

"Look, life is long, and every career has its setbacks," she told him. "Why don't you come back to _The Echo_ for a bit? Help you shore up your credentials with some solid reporting while you sort things out at home, before you put your name back out there."

"Yeah," scoffed Olly with the slightest hint of a sneer, before he caught himself and added, "I appreciate that, Maggie. But do you really need me, given how many staff you have now?"

"I'm the editor, I get to make these calls," Maggie insisted. "You're a good reporter, Olly, and we can always use more good reporters. Besides, here in Broadchurch, we look out for our own."

Which was absolutely true. But, as Olly left the Traders Hotel, Maggie watched his retreating figure with the slightest of frowns, recalling Olly's initial reaction to the thought of returning to _The Echo_. Maybe Broadchurch didn't provide the same opportunity for blockbuster reporting as London, but didn't Olly remember how _important_ it was to make sure that the community was well-informed? She shook off her slight unease. Olly was working through some severe disappointment. Surely he'd come round and remember what had drawn him to this field, in the first place, once he was more settled.

And Olly did settle back into the daily routine of life at _The Echo_ quickly enough. He remained his witty and charming self, never sitting still, always getting himself involved in everyone else's projects. Maggie watched as he used each assignment to hone his writing, to refine his interviewing skills. And a part of her grieved, because Olly Stevens had changed. Gone was the enthusiastic teenager who had followed each lead so avidly for the pure love of the chase. Now, every move that Olly made seemed calculated, aimed towards enhancing the résumé that Maggie watched him send out evening after evening, to one newspaper after another.

"It's not that I don't care about _The Echo_ ," Olly insisted one night. "It's not that I don't care about you and everything you've done for me..."

"I know, petal," Maggie sighed. "You've just outgrown Broadchurch. I understand."

Because she had seen it before, how ambition could turn a person's mind from caring about those around them like they should. And she didn't blame Olly, on some level—hadn't she, Maggie Radcliffe, once been equally fueled by a desire to see her name on the front-page bylines of the biggest national papers? Age would hopefully temper Olly's thirst for power, just as it had for so many of them. Maggie just wished that, even at his young age, she could make Olly _see_ what impact his actions might have, if his concern for his reputation began to supersede his professional commitment to the pursuit of the truth.

"I was thinking the other day about the first time we met," Olly mentioned casually one afternoon. "That time you'd published something about my mum allegedly stealing money from a bake sale to cover her gambling debts."

Maggie grimaced. The truth always mattered, but it still wasn't exactly _fun_ to be reminded of the times that her beloved paper had bruised the egos of people who, while certainly guilty of incredibly stupid things, were not themselves bad.

"What about it?" she asked.

"Well, it was an interesting lesson in the power of the press," Olly shrugged. "She quietly returned all of the money afterwards, you know. It's kind of incredible, when you think about it, that we have the ability to make or break reputations like that, isn't it?"

"Oh, you're only just figuring that out, are you?" Maggie set down the proof that she was reviewing and leaned slightly towards Olly, her elbows on her desk. "Listen, Olly. I know how much you wanna get out of here, and I'm hoping with every fibre of my being that you end up where you want and need to be. But trust me when I tell you that, in a town like Broadchurch, you can't be a good journalist unless you _care_ about every single person around you. Yeah, you've got the power to make or break reputations, and you'd damn well better be careful with how you use it. Don't wield it recklessly and hurt people for no good reason, just because you can. It won't help you in the long run, either."

And Olly listened, his dark eyes as serious as always. But Olly was an impulsive twenty-five years old, and he simmered with the peculiar cynicism of a promising youth with thwarted ambitions. Maggie should have known that, when handed the big lead that he'd always dreamt of getting, her sternest warnings would have no effect on Olly's judgement. Yet she still had held out enough hope that seeing the tweet stopped her dead in her tracks, as stunned as if she had just taken a cricket bat to the nose.

"Are you doing all right?" Jocelyn asked, after she had calmly talked Maggie through the potential legal liability that _The Echo_ might face over the premature disclosure of Danny Latimer's identity.

Maggie hesitated for a moment too long.

"Just hurt," she finally admitted. "I suppose I knew he was capable of doing something like this, but I never thought he would. I'd trained him to be so much _better_ than this."

"It happens," Jocelyn told her after a pause on her end of the line. "No matter how hard we try, it still happens. But he's not your responsibility, Maggie, not when he's going rogue like this."

 _Of course he's my responsibility_ , Maggie fumed silently. Who else had Olly trusted with his hopes and dreams? Who else had he felt he could turn to, when the burden of his mother's addiction grew too heavy for one teenage boy to bear? Who else had he looked up to, as a role model, as a trusted friend? If Maggie _didn't_ care so much about Olly Stevens—with his hunger for knowledge and his eye for detail and his drive for greatness—then she never would have handed him all of the journalistic weapons that he needed to wound her as deeply as he had. And that made his betrayal all the worse.

"I'm worried about him, Jocelyn," she sighed into the phone. "He's so desperate to make his name and get picked up by a nationally syndicated paper. He thinks this is his big break, his ticket out of Broadchurch. And I'm afraid that his ambition is blinding him to all of the people he's going to hurt along the way."

Jocelyn said nothing, and Maggie winced—how stupid _was_ she, to have used that _exact_ phrasing in expressing that _exact_ sentiment to Jocelyn Knight?

"Tell him to apologise to the police," Jocelyn advised at long last. "If speaking with them doesn't impress the gravity of the situation upon him, then I'm not sure what will. And Maggie?"

"Yeah?"

"You have to be prepared to let Olly Stevens go, if it comes to it. I know how much he means to you, and I know how strongly you feel about taking care of people within this community. But your reputation is at stake now, too."

Maggie's hand shook a bit where it gripped the phone. This was _just like_ Jocelyn, to insist that Maggie put her professional interests before the people she cared about. Well, damn it, Maggie Radcliffe wasn't afraid to go down fighting for the people she loved.

"Thanks for the advice, Jocelyn," she said. "We'll definitely apologise to the police."

Only after Jocelyn had hung up did Maggie permit herself the long, anxious exhale that had been building up inside of her. Perhaps it was too late to rescue Olly Stevens from his own ambition, the same way it had been too late to rescue Jocelyn Knight from hers. But Maggie sure as hell was going to try. Olly had once reached out to her, hoping to follow in her footsteps as a journalist who did her work with thoughtfulness and integrity. Maybe there was enough of that intrepid, truth-seeking teenager left to make him see the error of his ways.

"Olly," she said as the young man in question sauntered into the office, checking something on his mobile. "Come on."

"Where to?" Olly asked, clearly alarmed by the quiet rage radiating from his mentor.

"Just across the street." Maggie grabbed Olly's arm and steered him out the door towards the Traders Hotel. "Little chat with the police. We both have reputations to salvage, and since you're the one who's gotten us in the shit, you're gonna follow my lead on this, petal." She paused, just outside the hotel. "You understand why what you did was so wrong, don't you, Olly? And you'll _think_ , before you publish anything in the future, about how it might impact other people?"

Olly nodded, unable to meet Maggie's gaze.

"Well, let's get this over with, then," Maggie sighed, holding the door for Olly. Better for him to learn this lesson now, after all, than in a context where someone's life was on the line.

**Author's Note:**

> UPDATE: And... apparently I wasn't done having feels about these two being ridiculous together, because here's a [sequel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24892063) of sorts about Olly gaining a bit more of a professional conscience.


End file.
